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Phoenix to Earthlings: I’ve Landed! Awesome!

@infoholic Yup, I can dig into frozen ground as hard as concrete. The scoop has special blades and a powered “rasp” to scrape ice. Cool!

Whoever thought a NASA spacecraft could be so adept at social networking and Web 2.0?

For users of Twitter, a Web microblogging service, the Phoenix Mars lander has been sending pithy news “tweets” to the cellphones and computers of interested “followers.”

As of late Friday, the Phoenix lander had 9,636 followers at Twitter, more than triple the number of a week earlier. According to twitterholic.com, it ranks No. 30 among all Twitter feeds in the solar system.

Here’s a great picture of my deployed arm with the scoop on the end: http://tinyurl.com/3s354p I can’t wait to dig in the dirt next week.

One Twitter reader wrote: “Wow, @MarsPhoenix must be really bored. He posts, like, all the time!”

Of course, the messages are not coming from Mars. Instead, Veronica McGregor, the news services manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., has been playing the part of Phoenix each night after she gets home from work, forwarding questions to the science team and then posting answers.

“It’s been amazing,” Ms. McGregor said. “I had no idea. I didn’t know how many people were using Twitter.”

Photo

To my non-Martian friends at Twitter.com: My robotic arm camera got some great shots around my feet. Is that ice there?Credit
NASA

The most recent posts are at http://twitter.com/MarsPhoenix, and soon “twitterers” will probably learn about an instrument short circuit described at a news conference on Friday. (Mission managers said they were confident they could fix it.)

Most twitterers use the service to send up-to-the-second news about the minutiae of their lives to friends, but Rhea Borja, a member of Ms. McGregor’s team, sees it as a way to spread NASA news to twentysomethings. “To reach a new generation of folks,” said Ms. Borja, a thirtysomething.

The tweets were written in the first person, as if Phoenix the friendly spacecraft were sending out text messages to friends and fans. In part, that was to be more entertaining, Ms. McGregor said, but a larger reason was the austere limit of 140 characters per message imposed by Twitter, which turns tweets into a literary form akin to haiku.

“If I had to write ‘the spacecraft is,’ that’s too many characters,” Ms. McGregor said. “I am” is much shorter.

“It allowed me to put a lot more information into every entry,” she said

As the Phoenix approached its landing on Sunday, more than 3,000 followers received a quick succession of tweets:

Atmospheric entry has started. time to get REALLY nervous. Now I’m in the “seven minutes of terror.”